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Dark and damp weather descended on the core of the city and umbrellas were common on the streets of downtown Edmonton on June 19, 2019. Photo by Shaughn Butts / Postmedia

Edmontonians are not looking on the bright side.

The 2019 Vital Signs study by the Edmonton Community Foundation and Edmonton Social Planning Council paints a pessimistic picture with only 55 per cent of residents rating their quality of life as very good or excellent.

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Roughly 49 per cent believe there are adequate job opportunities in the city, down from last year’s 53 per cent. The highest rate was in 2017 at 76 per cent.

“We found this was a very pessimistic year for attitudes in general,” Elizabeth Bonkink, communications advisor for Edmonton Community Foundation, said on Tuesday.

“(The reason) could be a combination of many things. It could be the economic downturn. There’s also a stat here that talks about only 34 per cent agree they trust the government. That could be a big factor. (Going) from 45 (per cent in 2018) to 34 is a big jump.”

The study also shows the number of people who agree certain groups face discrimination has gone down but Bonkink said that doesn’t mean there’s less of it happening. Instead, people may be focusing more on their own problems.

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More findings

Less than 50 per cent of Edmontonians feel the city is senior-friendly and 51 per cent believe social media contributes to improving social connections. Roughly 23 per cent feel socially isolated, the highest number since the question was posed in 2016.

Bonkink said the Vital Signs study was started years ago in Toronto and is used to compare cities to how everything is going.

“It basically benchmarks different things like housing and homelessness,” she said. “We are presenting this back to the city and what people do with it is really up to them, but we do direct some of our granting programs for that. For example, we did food security as our very first vital signs.”

Not everything had a negative shade in the study.

A vast majority of Edmontonians felt the city had an adequate number of green spaces in the community. The study also highlighted the city’s efforts to ban conversion therapy and making the informal lookout known as the End of the World safer.

The study also shows only 12 per cent of 61,912 dogs were not spayed or neutered while fewer than one per cent of 30,860 cats didn’t receive the service.